The Island of the Colorblind, and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks
263 pages
Published 1996
Read August 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise
brought this book to my attention, mentioning the achromatopsic
islanders of Pingelap in passing as representative of a whole other type
of society, a scotopic existence flourishing in the to us "unreliable"
light of dawn, dusk, and moon. Meloy exaggerated a bit, if I remember
correctly -- I certainly came away from Turquoise with the
impression that "entire villages" functioned in the half light of
crepuscular times. Right from the start, Sacks establishes that no more
than 10-15% of the islanders are achromatopsic, still a remarkable
population, but nothing like the "Wellsian" fantasy implicit in the
title, a fantasy Sacks freely (and winsomely) confesses to harboring
before his journey to Pingelap.
But I don't need a fully
colorblind society to enjoy this book. This sounds seriously awkward and
weird, but between this book and Sacks' Oaxaca Journal, I feel
as if I would really enjoy being this guy's friend. His scarcely buried
desire to be a Victorian polymath and naturalist, his lack of natural
social graces, his charmingly frank admission of romantic notions
nurtured by Wells and Conan Doyle, his love of ancient plants and his
"profound sense of being at home" in cycad forests and other glimpses of
deep time -- I think he and I would get along, in some possibly creepy
fanboy dimension. I've never felt that about an author before. While you
may rest assured I won't be hiding in the ferns outside his house any
time soon, I do feel that reading his books -- especially the more
rambly books where he mingles ancient botany with all the neuroscience
-- is a terrific treat.
Incidentally, I hate books with endnotes I
actually have to read. I love all the extra information, but I hate
having to flip between two parts of a book and maintaining two bookmarks
as I go. This is exactly the reason footnotes were invented.
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